1 HDD corrupts Windows 10 while another slows down drastically

1 HDD corrupts Windows 10 while another slows down drastically

So, in my desktop setup, I have 2 hard drives, one is a 2nd hand 1TB HDD which was, according to the previous owner, "barely used and left sitting around for awhile". I've had windows 10 installed and running well on it for roughly 3-5 weeks. I installed a clean install of Windows 10 on this HDD as my previous Win10 installation had a number of strange issues that I wasn't able to fix and 600GB was starting to prove not big enough anymore. After installing to this 2nd hand 1TB drive, all the issues were fixed and worked without a hitch I even saw some performance improvements in terms of this HDD being faster and more responsive. I kept the previous installation on the 600GB HDD so that I had a bit of redundancy if this 2nd hand drive started playing up.

One day, I decided to boot into the previous installation, I wanted to copy some screenshots over to the new installation's Documents folder, I needed to update permissions so that this old installation had access to the new installation's personal files. This silently failed and just froze the window. So I gave up and rebooted into the new installation. To find that all of the folders that the old installation tried to get access to were now corrupted! I switched to the administrator account, which was fine, and ran chkdsk on the C: Drive to try and fix it. After rebooting and such as is required, the initial files weren't corrupted anymore, but there were now various other problems, including the Start Menu not loading, the taskbar, any explorer.exe processes randomly freezing, and right clicking on anything (be it files, or cmd.exe in Windows 10's search bar) or opening the Run dialogue with Windows + R taking roughly one minute consistently. I eventually managed to get chkdsk running again, but it now freezes at 11% and does nothing for hours.

After giving up on windows to automatically run chkdsk, I went into recovery mode and ran it from the CMD panel from there. This worked, the C: drive was mapped as System Reserved, but I worked around that and got it to finish a chkdsk /v /f /r followed by sfc /scannow in 7 hours (both with the proper tags to ensure they scanned the main partition, not System Reserved). But now it refuses to boot whatsoever. It just stays on the boot animation forever.

So, I gave up on this 2nd hand disk and changed the bios settings so that it now boots into the 600GB HDD by default, including it's old installation of Windows 10 that was buggy. But now it's too slow to be usable, it takes 1 minute for the login text box to accept text after sliding up the lock screen.

Am I mistaken in thinking that one 2nd hand HDD just destroyed 2 Hard Drives? And if not, what's wrong with the 1st hard drive?

This is already a wall of text, but for anyone interested, here's some extra tidbits of information that might be useful;

All this was done over a 24 hour period.

The new installation is no longer an activated verson of windows.

The verbose chkdsk that I ran only reported replacing a number of security IDs for a good 100 or so unnamed files, it didn't report doing anything else.

The SFC didn't report any changes that it made, but it claimed that it did fix a few system files, that didn't help it get past the boot animation though.

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Yes, I typed something along the lines of
chkdsk /v /f /r /windir=E:\Windows /bootdir=E: E:
After confirming that the C drive that was corrupted was in E: by using something along the lines of
winpart
list volumes

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I've tried that, safe mode fails to load silently. I can get into recovery options and such, but there's no getting past the boot animation (Windows logo and spinning circle).
It would help if Windows 10 was a little more verbose so that I could see what it's failing to access.
I'm going to try running a few SMART tests on this 1TB HDD tomorrow to confirm if it's a hardware issue, but even if that's the case, the reduced performance on the 600GB HDD is a mystery.

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Am I mistaken in thinking that one 2nd hand HDD just destroyed 2 Hard Drives? And if not, what's wrong with the 1st hard drive?

No I do not think you are mistaken at least in my recent experience. I recently did a clean install to a new SSD. On first boot after install BIOS decided to boot from an older installed OS HDD that I had not repartitioned after delegating it to data duty. That drive totally corrupted my recent clean install disk so I had to do another clean install with old OS disk disconnected.
My BIOS seems to get confused when I replace the OS drive with another OS drive, cloned OS drive or clean install on existing drive. I used same SATA port for new drive.
So:

For single OS computers the safest course seems to be 1. Use disk management to see what disks have a system partition. 2. Disconnect (or remove system partition from) any non OS disks that have an older system partition before upgrading or replacing primary OS disk. 3. Only have one disk with system partition running in your computer at a given time.

Another approach would be to set up your BIOS so that it always asks what disk you would like to boot from before booting.

I hope this is of some help

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Right, that makes it sound like this is a Windows 10 feature. I know that windows 10 activates itself using digital entitlement, which works even if you remove the system HDD and install Win10 on a new hard drive (I don't know how that works, perhaps it stores a key in the BIOS?). Perhaps Windows doesn't take nicely to having 2 copies of Windows 10 with the same licence on the same machine and tries to disable one of them? If so, those are some foul tactics on Microsoft's part.

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